Neil Hunt, Netflix's Chief Product Officer, explains why the streaming selections vary from country to country on Quora:

Each country notionally has a different catalog, although there is substantial overlap. Licensing is generally for a region (e.g. Latin America, or Nordics), so countries within the region have very similar (but not identical) catalogs.

Sometimes a shared title is the same media in each country; sometimes the title has been edited (e.g. for ratings compliance, or just to add or removed a channel bumper), in which case it's actually a different media file. In general, the ID spaces are separate by region.

I'm sure that trying to secure international rights to some titles is probably a nightmare, but as Netflix grows it might get easier.

Comments

It's going to be a nightmare for Netflix when content owners finally clue in to foreign users getting around country specific licensing restrictions by re-routing their IP addresses through the US. It's rampant in Canada and the UK where the consensus is: our Netflix sucks, USA is much better so we're going to take advantage of it.

In the UK, and yes our selection is pretty weak in comparison, since Sky owns nearly everything. However, with Unblock Us I can change freely between any of the other Netflix regions, and Moreflicks provides a multi-region search (which also includes Hulu). How long before they put a stop to this I wonder? Are they even able to stop it?

Is it really surprising that Netflix US has more than UK, Canada, etc? I mean, 20+ million streaming customers are in the US. 5 million total for all the other countries combined. Mo'money=Mo'streaming